Leading at Next to Leading Order: The Importance of Radiative Corrections to Dark Matter Annihilation

Abstract: The particle nature of dark matter is one of the greatest mysteries in modern physics. Though Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) are among the most popular candidates, no evidence for non-gravitational dark matter interactions has yet been seen. As space based experiments become more sensitive, there is the real possibility of detecting the products of WIMP annihilation from the center of galaxies. 

In this talk I will discuss models in which dark matter consists of heavy Majorana fermions, a notable example being supersymmetric neutralino dark matter. In these models annihilation into a fermion anti-fermion pair is suppressed by helicity arguments, making the astrophysical signatures of annihilation negligible. This suppression can be lifted through the radiation of a gauge boson during annihilation, causing processes at next to leading order in perturbation theory to be the most prominent from an observational standpoint. We will investigate the effect that strong corrections can have on both the total dark matter cross section and  final state particle spectra, and hence the importance of these processes in determining expected indirect detection rates.